CyberGhost VPN

A powerful and full-featured VPN from a popular privacy provider

Our Verdict

CyberGhost VPN is a capable service with an extremely powerful Windows client. The company’s mobile apps are not quite as advanced though they still perform well. Low three-year prices and helpful live chat support round out the company’s offering.

Pros

Powerful Windows client

Decent value for long-term subscriptions

Unblocks Netflix, iPlayer

Speedy live chat support

Cons

Only 24-hour trial for desktops

Desktop interface can seem complicated

Poor support website

Below average speeds on a few servers

CyberGhost is a Romanian and German-based privacy giant which provides VPN services to over 10 million users.

CyberGhost VPN has more than 3,000 servers across 60 countries with clients for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and more.

In addition to its VPN, the company includes a host of bundled extras. CyberGhost VPN can block malicious websites, ads and trackers while automated HTTPS redirection ensures you make the most secure connection possible with every website. Also optional data compression can reduce bandwidth which could be useful while browsing with a VPN on mobile.

Plans and pricing

CyberGhost VPN offers four plans and users that sign up for a longer subscription stand to save the most.

The company’s monthly account costs $14.30 (£10.99) per month which is more expensive than the competition. Luckily the price drops to $5.84 (£4.49) a month with an annual plan. Users that sign up for a two year plan will pay $4.41 (£3.39) per month and those that choose a three year plan will spend even less at just $3.25 (£2.50) each month.

Some of the CyberGhost’s plans may include unexpected extras. While reviewing this VPN, we noticed that one year and longer plans came with a ‘1-year McAfee subscription.’ This wasn’t made clear to us before we chose a one-year plan and selected a payment method, so be sure to try that before making your final purchase.

CyberGhost supports a number of payments options including credit cards, PayPal and even Bitcoin.

There are free trials available but how they work is a little more complicated than most. On Windows for instance, you get 24 hours to try the service out. However, if you download the CyberGhost iOS or Android app, you’ll have 7 days to try out this VPN.

Logging and privacy

As with many other VPNs, CyberGhost’s website proudly boasts that it has a ‘strict no logs policy’ right on its front page.

The company’s Privacy Policy does a good job of backing up this claim, saying:

"...when using the CyberGhost VPN, the user's traffic data such as browsing history, traffic destination, data content and search preferences are not monitored, recorded, logged or stored by the Company. More than this, when using the CyberGhost VPN, we are not storing connection logs, meaning that we don't have any logs tied to your IP address, connection timestamp or session duration."

While brief descriptions like this aren’t always precise, the policy goes on to spell out the implications.

"We do NOT know at any time which user ever accessed a particular website or service We do NOT know which user was connected to our CyberGhost VPN service at any given time or which CyberGhost VPN server IP they used We do NOT know the set of original IP addresses of a user’s computer"

As with all VPNs, just because a company says no logging doesn’t necessarily mean this is true, so browse at your own risk.

Performance

In order to test CyberGhost VPN’s performance we connected to multiple servers and used the benchmarking websites SpeedTest and Netflix’ Fast.

The closest servers to our location in the UK delivered solid and reliable speeds at around 60 to 70Mbps. In other European countries, our speeds were similar at around 60Mpbs but when we connected to servers in the US are speeds dropped to around 40 to 55Mbps which is still quite acceptable performance.

Our tests only give a snapshot of performance at a point in time, so we highly recommend signing up for a free trial and connecting to the servers you intend to use this VPN with before making your final decision.

Client setup

CyberGhost goes out of its way to make sure that the entire setup process is as easy as possible.

After clicking the trial link on the company’s website, we quickly downloaded the Windows installer. We then accepted the terms and conditions, entered our email address and password and once we confirmed our address in a follow-up email, we were ready to go.

CyberGhost offers clients for Windows, Mac, Android and iOS though there are tutorials on its website to help you setup its VPN on Linux and even on routers.

Support

CyberGhost has a number of guides on its website for Windows, iOS, Mac, Android, Linux, Kodi, routers and even gaming consoles. There are also troubleshooting articles and assorted other FAQs.

However, we did notice some translation issues when browsing the company’s guides. You can still understand the points they are trying to make but it is clear that they were poorly translated from their original language into English.

Fortunately, CyberGhost also offers support via email and live chat. The live chat option was a little difficult to find and we had to click a help button and enter a keyword to search the knowledgebase before the chat button finally appeared.

Final verdict

CyberGhost VPN stands out from the competition for its powerful yet easy-to-use Windows client. Bitcoin support and live chat are just a few of the other highlights that make this VPN worth checking out for yourself.

The Verdict

4

out of 5

CyberGhost VPN

CyberGhost VPN is a capable service with an extremely powerful Windows client. The company’s mobile apps are not quite as advanced though they still perform well. Low three-year prices and helpful live chat support round out the company’s offering.

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